


Who Watches Over the Overwatch?

by Innwich



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: M/M, Past Relationship(s), Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-05
Updated: 2016-06-05
Packaged: 2018-07-12 12:46:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7104040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Innwich/pseuds/Innwich
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“A long time ago, I read a comic book. It was written in the nineteen-eighties, but you know what they say.” Jack pulled on his glove. “Oldies but goldies.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Who Watches Over the Overwatch?

The floor was covered in shards of broken glass. A cold wind was blowing into the laboratory through the missing windows. Only one of the windows hadn’t been shot out, and it was peppered with bullet holes. The spidery cracks in the glass blocked out the light from the full moon and clear sky, and left a long, dark patch that stretched from the floor to the wall on the other side of the room.

Not that it mattered. Jack could see well enough. The night vision mode built into his visor lit up the room for him like it was daytime.

The computers that lined the two sides of the laboratory had been smashed into bits. Pieces of circuit boards lay scattered amongst the shards of glass. There was no salvaging them. A lab technician lay on the floor next to an overturned swivel chair and a spilled soda. The white lab coat stuck out like an untainted canvas tucked away in a dusty attic.

“Hnn.” Jack tucked his gun under his arm and pulled off his right glove. He flipped over the lab technician. There was no mistaking the dead body for the living. The skin was dry and cracked and drained of blood. A chunk of hair had fallen off the side of the head, revealing the mottled skin underneath. The clothes were still warm to the touch, but the body looked like it had been left in a desert under the sun for a week. It was the seventh body he’d found in this condition tonight.

Too late again.

He had gotten closer tonight, but it wasn’t close enough. He could have saved these people.

“A long time ago, I read a comic book. It was written in the nineteen-eighties, but you know what they say.” Jack pulled on his glove. “Oldies but goldies.”

Silence answered him. The dead body was shriveling up and was dwarfed by its lab coat. Nothing in the laboratory moved.

“Story starts with a mystery man killing a retired superhero,” Jack said, looking at the surveillance camera mounted on the ceiling across from the door. The camera had been destroyed by a messy shotgun shot, like all the other cameras that Jack had spotted on his way into the building. “The dead hero was old and slow and yesterday’s news; he was no use to anyone. No one knew who the killer was or why the killer did it. Not until the end of the book when it was too late to stop him and his plans.”

“You got the story wrong, as you do with everything,” a voice said from the shadows. “It’s not about a cold-blooded killer murdering good men that didn’t deserve it. It’s about the fallibility and moral perversion of the self-proclaimed protectors of the world.”

A dark, thick mist was gathering by the blocked-out window.

The first time Jack had seen nanites in action, he had been watching Ziegler demonstrate the use of her medical nanotechnology on a fire victim. A cloud of nanites had floated out of a glass jar and moved through the air like a formless creature with a mind of its own. They had homed in on the second degree burns that had covered half of the man’s bodies and closed every wound that they had touched. Painfully tender, pink skin had grown over the burns over the course of an hour. It had been like watching an angel of God work its miracles back then. But this mist didn’t look so angelic now, as it gave form to the hooded figure that had appeared too many times on the news and newspapers.

“It’s about why people shouldn’t trust heroes,” Reyes said. His voice echoed eerily behind the strange, white mask he wore over his face. “But you already know that.”

“Yeah, a few bad apples spoil the bunch,” Jack said. “But you already know that.”

Reyes chuckled. It wasn’t a merry sound. “Assuming the bunch isn’t rotten to the core.”

“It ain’t never that bad.” Jack lowered his gun, but he didn’t drop it. Reyes was unarmed, if he could be called that. Metal claws glinted at the ends of his gloved fingers, but he hadn’t drawn his shotguns. Jack had seen the footage from the museum heist and read what witnesses had said, but he hadn’t realized how different Reyes was. Reyes’s long coat barely moved in the wind. The slivers of his elbows that weren’t covered by the top of his gauntlets were deathly pale and nowhere close to what human skin should look like, let alone the tanned skin tone he used to have. “You don’t look so hot.”

”No thanks to you or Ziegler,” Reyes said.

“Anyone but you, huh?” Jack said. The remark came out sour in his mouth. This was how they ended up in a room with a dead body and destroyed hard drives in a classified research facility. Because, at the end of the day, Reyes always blamed everything and everyone but himself. Jack hadn’t expected any different from Reyes. Jack might as well ask for the moon, and he would have an easier time getting it.

“You know it is.”

“Yeah, well,” Jack said. “I don’t know what Ziegler did, but you were supposed to be dead. As a matter of fact, you should have stayed dead.”

“I could say the same about you,” Reyes said. “You’re better dead than alive. The little kiddies look up to you as the martyr for Overwatch. That was why you didn’t bother showing up at your funeral, wasn’t it? So you don’t get remembered as the disgraced commander of an illegal organization.”

“Think whatever you want,” Jack said. “I ain’t gonna stop you. I got tired of trying to get through to you six years ago.”

“Good, because I think you’re a rabid dog that’s out of control and someone should notify the pound,” Reyes said. “Rabid dogs get put down. They don’t get statues and memorials built in their names.”

“You almost convinced me,” Jack said. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’re not jealous.”

“Funny guy,” Reyes drawled, and the words rattled in his throat. “Your deadpan is even better with that mask over your face. And I can see why you wear it. You’ve always been vain about your looks. About time you get a reality check.”

Jack’s grip tightened on his gun, and Jack had to force himself to relax. He would’ve gotten worked up by now if he’d been taunted like this years ago. Hell, made it five years and he would’ve torn a kid’s head off. But he wasn’t that man anymore. He could take it. He wouldn’t lose his cool because someone wouldn’t shut up about the scars that he had to see in the mirror every morning when he shaved in front of the mirror. “I didn’t hear you complain.”

“My golden boy,” Reyes said. It was hard to make out the emotions behind his words when they were not laced with contempt and mockery. If Reyes was looking for a reaction, he didn’t pause long enough to find one. “But I’m guessing you aren’t here to talk about the good old days.”

“Who are you working for?” Jack said shortly. The old nickname raised the hair on Jack’s arms and itched under his skin where he couldn’t scratch it. But when he remembered the pictures of the smoldering pile of debris that the HQ had been refused to and the bodies that had been buried under it, he found it a hell lot easier to focus on the weight of the gun in his hands and the chill in the room that he was standing in. He’d returned after six years of licking his wounds and he would be damned if he let things like sentiments and camaraderie and love and a bunch of old lies stopped him now. “Why are you killing former Overwatch agents?”

“Maybe you should take another look at that comic book you were talking about,” Reyes said. “Life imitates art in the strangest ways.”

“What? You planning to kill millions to stop global nuclear war from breaking out?” Jack said. “You’re a century too late for that. Nuclear war has gone out of fashion.”

“Like I said, funny,” Reyes said. “No, try think further back. Back to before the story started. Back to the people turning on us. Back to the Petras Act banning Overwatch activities. Anything of that sounds familiar? I heard someone is putting Overwatch back together, and they even recruited Amari’s daughter.

“What are you talking about?” Jack said irritably. He had done his share of interrogations after he’d gone dark, and he didn’t like doing any of them. It wasn’t because he didn’t like kicking the tar out of his interrogation subjects, but because of the amount of bullshit he had to wade through before he let himself go for the direct approach and beat the answer out of the lowlife and scum. “You mean Pharah?”

“Bringing in a girl that has always lived in the shadow of her mother. I can’t see how that will possibly go wrong,” Reyes said. “And it’s like in the comic book, isn’t it?”

“Screw the comic book.” Jack raised his gun at Reyes. “I don’t have time for games. What are you planning?”

“Patience is a virtue,” Reyes said slowly. “When I’m done with my plans, you’ll know what they are.”

“Tell me your goddamn plans!” The bullets shattered the window and sent a sleet of glass shards raining down onto the streets below. Reyes had disappeared in a cloud of smoke. Jack spun around and fired at the space behind himself. He hit nothing but a row of computers and his bullets tore through the monitors.

Reyes laughed. His laughter was faint but it was echoing around Jack from everywhere and nowhere. Jack turned on the spot but he couldn’t pinpoint a location where the sound was coming from. His visor wasn’t detecting anyone else in the room.

“Do you remember what happened at the end of the comic book, to the vigilante that refused to stop asking questions?” Reyes’s disembodied voice said. “It didn’t go so well for him.”

“Show yourself.” Jack prowled the room. Glass shards crunched under his boots. “You can’t hide from me.”

“The train will go down to the end of the line, and you won’t be able to stop it,” Reyes said. “Things will finally go my way.”

Jack looked under the desks and tables. The working areas were free of clutter. The lab would have been immaculate if not for the wrecked computer parts that strewn the floor. In a far corner of the room was a sliding door. Jack drew his gun and pulled the door open. Behind the door were shelves of laboratory apparatuses. No one could be hiding in here. Jack was closing the door when a red dot blinked on his visor. His visor had detected a target.

Reyes was standing by the only door at the other end of the room. Smoke curled around his feet, but his flickering outline was turning solid.

Jack didn’t wait for an invitation. He took aim and fired and the pulses lit up the room with short bursts of blue light. “You’ll pay for what you did to Overwatch. I’ll make damn sure of it.”

“The way I remember it, it was your poor leadership that brought Overwatch to its knees.” Reyes sidestepped the gunfire with inhumane ease. Two of the bullets went through his chest but they didn’t slow him. “And your bullets that gave it the mercy killing it needed.”

“That’s a lie,” Jack growled.

“Is it?”

Was it?

Jack had asked himself that question every waking moment since Switzerland.

Innocent people had died in the collapse.

And the only thing Jack knew for sure was that he had been shooting too when it had happened.

The gun’s chamber clicked empty. With a frustrated grunt, Jack ejected the magazine from his gun. He hadn’t been counting his shots, but Reyes apparently had, because Reyes was picking his way to the broken windows and fading into the wind like smog.

“I’ll find you, and it won’t be a freak accident that kills you.” Jack yanked out a new magazine from his belt. He wasn’t as young as he used to be and his fingers were stiff as sticks in his gloves, but maybe he could still reload his gun and get in a shot before Reyes disappeared again. “This time I won’t miss.”

Reyes laughed again. Jack was getting real tired of his laugh. It drilled into his ears and dug into his skull and made him remember the times when they had shared a beer because it’d been the last one in the pack.

“Don’t kid yourself, Morrison. Since when have you missed a shot?” Reyes sneered. “You didn’t miss last time. You never miss.”

**Author's Note:**

> A lot of Overwatch's plot points remind me of Watchmen. :)
> 
> And yes, Soldier: 76 is totally Rorschach.


End file.
